Householder

The weather has changed.

After days of sodden, bleak dreariness, this morning the skies cleared and there was a bite in the air.

The world is still an ocean of mud, in which the dogs rolled, joyfully, on our walk this morning.

I contemplated heading on up to the top of the fell, because the weather was so splendid, but idleness triumphed, and I came back to peg the washing in the garden  and fill the hearth with firewood instead.

Of course I have still got Lucy here, so I am not on my own at the moment. I quite like this, although somehow I don’t manage to get nearly as much done. This morning was no exception, and instead of cleaning the kitchen shelves, which was the thing that really needed doing, we had an extra cup of tea and talked about buying a house.

I think I told you that she has seen one that she thinks she might like to own. It is to be sold in an auction in a couple of weeks, and she thinks she might like to bid on it.

It is a crumbling terraced house which appears to have been occupied by the person who was driving Mark’s taxi. The grime inside it is quite dramatically spectacular, with grease and black mould competing with one another for wall space in the kitchen, nicotine stains clinging to the bedroom walls, and the sort of carpets that you might reasonably expect to find a dead dog underneath.

Apart from this it is five minutes’ walk away from the police station, has a splendidly overgrown garden, probably with a couple more dead dogs, and has never been occupied by a criminal. The police know about things like this.

We are hoping that nobody else will want to buy it and that Lucy can spend the next ten years of her life trying to make it beautiful.

If she manages to buy it we will be giving her a hammer and chisel for Christmas. She can use them to chip the walls clean. A scrubbing brush just won’t do it.

Obviously this is a path fraught with peril, but nevertheless she is hopeful. The bank has agreed to give her a mortgage if she would like one, and she has, very sensibly, worked out what she can afford and has decided to bid no higher than that. She has spent days and days calculating what she spends on fuel and boxes of wine and gas bills, what might be different in the new house, and how much she might then have spare.

The answer is, of course, not very much. She is concerned about this, as if she has become some sort of reckless hedonist in her quiet little one-bedroom nest, but of course she hasn’t. In fact she is, I think, commendably parsimonious, certainly compared to me at her age. Compared to me at any age, actually.

Obviously I will keep you posted, although I am not holding my breath. I think it is likely to sell for far more than she is prepared to pay, but we will see.

I have attached, by popular demand, a picture of our scary new television screen. The open boxes beside it are the hinges and brackets where Mark is going to hang it on the wall and then hang our picture over the top. I will be very glad of the picture. At the moment it is like having a light-consuming black void in the middle of our house, huge and troubling. It is a wonderful invention, but I am not yet happy about it.

I will like it much better when it is safely screwed to the wall, and not likely to leap to the floor and snap.